The millions of deaths due to flouride are probably masked by the millions of deaths due to aspartame.
Water is fluoridated in Denmark in Copenhagen and a number of other cities.
Countries where a proportion or a majority of the municipal water is fluoridated include Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Ireland and Israel, for what that’s worth (France and Germany add fluoride to table salt). Proclaiming that Continental Europe is largely opposed to water fluoridation doesn’t address the scientific issues.
I have yet to see any convincing documentation supporting claims that communities with naturally fluoridated water (even at concentrations higher than we would consider optimal) have better or worse health compared to communities lacking fluoride (with the exception of better teeth), or that artificial fluoridation is fundamentally different from natural fluoridation.
The major reason “the issue is not resolved” is that cranks have been relatively effective at promoting their claims (more so than antivaxers) and even getting public officials to sign onto them.
For instance, Israel will be ending water fluoridation in 2014, largely due to a push by the Minister of Health, who seems to have been heavily influenced by the pronouncements of an Irish scientist (Declan Waugh) who blames fluoridation for a massive laundry list of health problems and self-published a lengthy report on the subject (unfortunately not in any recognized journal and thus not peer-reviewed).
A prophet goes unappreciated in his own land, as it seems Irish health officials aren’t going for this stuff.
Good evidence for changing/refining the means by which we achieve optimal fluoridation for dental health is welcome. Non-evidence based scaremongering is not.
I don’t have the cite and remember I am a dentist and in favor of fluoridation. Sometime in the 80’s I think, a dentist in Texas had a patient die of fluoride overdose. IIRC it was a young child 2 or 3years old. They placed a fluoride gel tray in his mouth and left him alone. He swollowed all the gel and died a couple of days later. Kidney failure. I don’t know the ammount he ingested but my WAG is that it was on the order of quite a few tubes of toothpaste. I may be recalling an article in the Texas Dental Journal but can’t remember for sure and am not going to try to find it. When you consider how many millions of fluoride treatments are done in office yearly and it is the only case I can recall in my 27 years shows how rare someting like that is.
Right back at you.
Did you read any of the cites provided (including the ones you cited) demonstrating no link between normal levels of fluoride found in municipal water supplies in the US and negative health consequences?
For the N-th time, the dose makes the poison, and we clearly don’t use toxic levels of fluoride .
The problem is (and forever will be) the association with the word “poison.” Laypeople want to be told “we’re not putting any rat poison in the water supply,” and instead they’re being told “we’re not putting much rat poison in the water supply.”
Hasn’t deterred lots of people at risk from blood clots from using coumadin (which also is “rat poison” at certain doses).
Chlorine killed lots of people in WWI when used as a gas, so it’s “poison”. But it’s saved a lot of lives and prevented misery by killing pathogens in our water supply.
Mercury is a toxin and poisonous at high enough doses. But its inclusion in multi-dose vaccine vials as thimerosal preservative* prevented a lot of cases of serious infection and death like the ones that occurred sporadically in the early days of vaccination.
and on and on…
*thimerosal has long been discontinued of course due to concerns about potential toxicity which was never documented.
The fact that the dose makes the poison (I never claimed otherwise BTW) is precisely why adding fluoride to the drinking water is such a bad idea. The amount of tap water people consume varies enormously.
If we had long-term randomized controlled trials demonstrating that fluoride was safe, it would make more sense to fluoridate table salt as salt consumption is much more uniform than tap water consumption.
Even at the highest conceivable levels of daily tapwater consumption (enough to induce fatal water intoxication), you can’t ingest a dangerous quantity of fluoride.
Wait…what? Have you got a cite for that? I will citelessly claim the contrary: salt consumption rates are all over the place, but just about everyone drinks at least a couple of liters of tap water a day.
The difference with Coumadin is that they’re not putting it in everyone’s water.
Thimerosal in vaccines does indeed scare some people.
But you raise an interesting point with the chlorine. How come we don’t hear people howling about the introduction of chemical weapons agents into public water supplies?
There are dingbats railing against chlorination too.
It makes you nostalgic for the days when you could get your drinking water from the communal pump, contract cholera and die naturally. 
The 2006 NRC report concluded that that EPA’s 4 mg/L maximum contaminant level goal (MCLG) should be lowered.
More from the CDC:
What point are you trying to make by posting this? That fluoride levels far in excess of the recommended 0.5-1.0 mg/L are a bad thing?
The salt thing is interesting, given that we already use salt as a delivery vehicle for supplemental iodine.
Every so often, you’ll see a petition get floated trying to ban water on those grounds (military experience has shown that consuming it enhances physical performance, and thus troops are required to consume it on a regular basis, and it is a vital component in many naval weapons systems, etc. etc.) Half the fun is to see how many people you can get to sign it not realizing it’s a joke.
The same site states that the EPA’s MCLG is currently much higher, 4 mg/L.
Again, what is your point? Please tell us all what your message is, and how it relates to fluoridation of public water supplies at levels of 0.5-1.0 mg/L.
Still don’t get your point. The bit you quoted from the CDC seems to indicate a) that considerably less than 1% of the US population is exposed to fluoride levels in excess of 2 mg/L in their water supplies; b) that the higher levels are from natural fluoridation, not additives. Is this not correct?
I find it hard to believe that any responsible water authority would be artificially adding fluoride to drinking water already containing natural fluoride levels at or near the EPA limit, or above the the CDC recommendation limiting Fluoride content to 2 mg/L. Have you some evidence that this is being done in these cases?
Lastly, with all the stuff you bolded in your quote, seems like this should have been bolded as well:
And sure enough, if your quote is factual, apparently 99% of the US population has tap water with 2mg/L or less fluoride content.
We have immensely large long-term trials in real life: they’re called “cities with fluoridation.” Studies have been conducted: lots of them. The safety and effectiveness of the process have been well established.
Fluoridating salt? Might work. Pity to deny good dental health to the children of conspiracy theorists, but if that’s one’s ideal – freedom of choice outweighs children’s health – then it could be an approach. Still, why discard what is known to work in favor of a novel experimental idea with no (as yet) evidence in support?
They use this method in France. But it’s still a disingenuous argument.
There’s more of a health risk from food borne diseases like e. coli and salmonella but less conspiracy theory and pseudo-scientific nutjobbery around them.
Yes but we need more studies. More. More, more, more. More, more, more, more more. We need to keep doing studies until paranoids can find one that suggests they are right. Then we will have done enough studies.